Margaretha (“Margaret”) Heck (1 April 1868-21 October 1946)
My mother shares a birthday – April Fools’ Day! – with her mother’s maternal grandmother, Margaretha (“Margaret”) Heck. In fact, my grandmother gave my mother Margaret as a middle name in honour of her grandmother.
My grandfather always called my mother “Maggie”, which of course is a derivative of her middle name. When I asked my mother why he preferred to do so, she said that her mother had wanted to give her Margaret as her first name, since my mother shared a birthday with her great grandmother. However, her father objected because people would call her Maggie, so my grandmother agreed to give my mother Margaret as her middle name.
My mother’s parents, Leo Burgess and Helen Lerner. Margaret Heck was Helen’s maternal grandmother.
Milton Burgess: “There’s Maggie!”
When my mother’s parents brought her home, her paternal grandfather was there and said, “there’s Maggie!” Since that time, Lorraine’s father and grandfather called her Maggie. Later, the immediate family and some of her cousins came to call her Maggie.
Of course, my mother was often teased by being called an April Fool because of her birthday. When we were kids, the tradition was that the time for pranking ends at 12 noon. My mother was adamant that she wasn’t an April Fool because she was born in the afternoon.
Once we were at my grandparents on April Fools’ Day and everyone was giving my mother grief about being an April Fool. My mother repeated her defense that she was born in the afternoon. My grandmother interjected and called out from the other room, “no you weren’t, you were born in the morning!”
Grandmothers: always siding with their grandchildren. Very funny!
I’ve written a fair amount about my Aunt Diana (Helen Diana Burgess 1951 – 1999), but usually I’ve focused on her scientific side. However, I’ve always considered her a true Renaissance Woman, because the arts were just as important to her. It’s why her scientific pursuits lead her into the colourful world of art conservation.
Helen loved paper and textiles, flowers, beautiful ceramics and glass, and cats. She was often teased by her friends for picking flowers wherever she could find them, including, in one instance, the Faculty Club garden at Queen’s. Helen enjoyed painting flowers and donated several of her watercolours to the Lupus Society.
Diana took me to the first movie I ever saw in a cinema, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Going to that movie was also the first time I rode a city bus. She also had some marvelous record albums, which included the original edition of Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember listening to it over and over again while reading all of my uncle’s comic books whenever we visited my grandparents.
This is the copy my Aunt Diana gave me, which my sons now have.
Books were often a welcome gift from her, often titles I had never heard of but came to love. Diana had a huge library of fiction and non-fiction books. In particular, she loved detective novels. The best book she gave me was from the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, Mystery of the Flaming Footprints. The books are about three boy detectives, which were everything boring old Hardy Boys books were not. I went on to buy many more from the series. I’ve passed them all on to my sons, who have read them all several times over.
When I was in undergrad, Diana introduced me to L.R. Wright and her first novel, The Suspect. That book quite blew my mind – a detective novel not only set in Canada rather than the US or UK. Moreover, it wasn’t someplace like Toronto, rather, it was set in the small town of Sechelt, only a short drive away from where live. It’s now been turned into a TV series, Murder in a Small Town.
Diana took me on tours of art galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was wonderful having someone so knowledgeable about art as my guide. Diana loved to paint as well. When I was 10, she gave me my first set of oil paints, along with a small canvas, brushes, turpentine, and linseed oil. It didn’t take long for me to accidentally spill some on the gold shag carpet in our living room. Oops. At least it was purple, which pairs well with gold.
She mostly painted still life, often in vibrant or bright colours, although sometimes she used a more muted palate. My mother has a few of her works, one of which now hangs in her living room.
Three years in a row, I signed up for Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”. The first two times, that was as far as I got. Hopefully, third time’s the charm. Hence this blog, only a quarter century behind the times.
I originally signed up for the 52 Ancestors Challenge for 2020, but did nothing afterwards. I signed up again for 2021, for which I also did nothing.
Somehow third time was the charm. I know there was something that spurred me on to actually do something for the 2022 challenge, but now for the life of me I can’t recall what that was!
Holy smokes, we’re now halfway through the year. Moreover, with 26 installments, we’re halfway through this year’s 52 Ancestors Challenge! With that, I’ve managed to consistently blog for six months. While it has been a bit of a slog the last few weeks, I’m so pleased I’ve stuck with it and made it this far!
I persevered and successfully completed the year. Building on that success, I signed up for 2023 edition of the Challenge. Once again, I completed all 52 weeks. Not only that, but I turned my first year’s set of posts in to a book that I printed and handed out as Christmas and Hannukah gifts!
Buoyed by that success, I re-upped a third time, for the 2024 edition of the Challenge. With eight weeks to go, I’m confident I’ll successfully complete all 52 weeks.
However, I have to be honest. The Challenge is becoming more challenging. I’ve picked the low hanging fruit several times now. It’s getting harder and harder to write about things I haven’t already covered before – sometimes more than once. Many times this year I thought I had come up with something entirely new, only to discover partway through or near completion that I had already written about the same thing. This year seems to have a few reruns, as I really did not want to start over. In fact, just discovered that I’ve already sort of covered the topic of the challenge of participating in the Challenge.
As a result, for the last month or so I haven’t produced anything for the current week before the next prompt is posted. (Although, ironically, the one week I was ahead of the prompt, it was delayed!) I know what Amy would say about that, but I’d still enjoy it more if I could keep more current.
As I’ve said before, the primary purpose of undertaking this blog was to get myself to write more about my family history after decades of researching and compiling information. Even though this year has been more challenging, I am still achieving that goal and continue to find value in participating.
That said, I don’t think I have it in me to do another full year of the Challenge, at least not in the way I’ve participated for nearly three years. However, I will need to think of something that is still regular and structured; without it, I can see a future where posts become fewer and farther apart in time, until it just peters out. Fortunately, Amy recently posted (I can’t remember if it was in her Facebook group, Generations Cafe, or in her emails) that she was planning something new or different for 2025. I can’t wait to see what that might be!
In the meantime, having completed a second full year of posts, I once again created a family history book based upon the compiled collection of entries for 2023! I hadn’t planned on another print edition, but as I started working on the electronic version I began to feel the need to be able to hold it and read it the old fashioned way. So here it is, A Book of Ancest0rs – Mark II!!
This week’s prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Lost Contact”. Losing contact is one way of losing a connection. Sometimes losing the connection might be necessary.
There are countless ways as to why a tree is such an excellent metaphor for genealogy. One comparison that might not be considered so often is that, like a tree, sometimes one’s family history might need some pruning.
As our research progresses over time and we add to our trees, we might discover that there are branches that no longer belong, which should never have been there in the first place. They might have been grafted to our trees early on, when we were new to genealogy, and did not realize that the connection was not supported by the evidence. There might be branches that seemed to be supported by the evidence that was available at the time, but new evidence comes to light that disproves the connection. When this happens, we have to cut that branch and end contact with the false connection.
I know that sometimes many genealogists have had a hard time making the cut. After all, until the connection was disproved, the individuals on the branch were considered family.
Over the years, I’ve made cuts now and again. Some small, some big. A few years ago I found a significant cut I had to make for my 6xG Grandfather, James Turner (1715-1773). James is on a branch of my tree for which I’ve had less interest than others over the years. He was the great grandfather of my 3xG Grandfather, Preston Thomas (1814-1877). While I’ve done quite a lot of research on Preston – and written about him here many times – I have not done much research on his lineage. Most of what I have is names and dates I gathered in the mid-90s during my earliest visits to the Family History Centre in Burnaby, and never really looked at again very seriously. It comes as no surprise to me when I have to prune some of the branches on Thomas’s line, including the parents of James Turner (which I wrote about on Week 8 of the 2023 52 Ancestors Challenge).
The other branches of my tree that I know need some more serious research and that might result in some pruning, or at least some revision, are the paternal lines of my maternal grandmother, Helen Burgess (1921-1984). I have great confidence in the information I have for Helen’s grandparents and her attachment to them. However, I have doubts about the lineage of her great grandfather Franciscus “Franz” Lerner (b. bet. 1835-1840 – d. 1876 or 1877) and her great grandfather Georg Jacob Anton (1843-1908).
For Franz, I am confident in the identity of his paternal grandfather [Franz Ignaz Lerner (1759-abt 1816 or later)]. The main problem is identifying his father. Franz’s father is one of either two individuals:
Michael Lerner born 11 Jul 1793 in Malsch, Karlsruhe, Baden, wife Maria Eva Eberle born 1793 in Pleisweiler, Bergzabern, Pfalz (although possibly Eva Eberle), or
Bernard Lerner born 27 Feb 1798 in Malsch, Karlsruhe, Baden, wife Barbara Heil born abt 1799 in Niederlustadt, Germersheim, Pfalz.
As for Georg Jacob, he might not actually be Georg Jacob. It is possible he is actually simply just Jacob. As for Georg Jacob’s father, the name I have is Johannes Anton; however, he might actually have been Peter Johannes Anton. Not only are the names I have slightly off from some other indicators, the birthdates I have for both is in question. Interestingly, the identity of their spouses does not seem to be as dubious. This leads me to believe that there is no mistaken branch here; rather, it is simply a matter of properly identifying Georg Jacob and Johannes.
I will add that even when I prune a branch, I keep a record of it. If large enough, I create a separate database for it; if not, I keep notes in my research logs or in the notes for the child whose parents I ended up cutting. That way I don’t retrace my steps or fall into old traps. Moreover, should it turn out the information actually was correct, I have it handy and can graft the branch back onto my main tree.
A Deck of Ancestors 